Benefits Agency officer Wendy Raymond had the shock of her life when she made a routine call on a man claiming disability allowance.

Claimant Gerald Clark, who answered the door in a wheelchair, was actually her window cleaner.

He was also regularly shinning up and down ladders for her daughter at £4 a time.

A court heard yesterday Clark, 61, of Seventh Avenue, Lancing, cheated the state out of just over £18,000.

Prosecutor Richard Lovegrove said the fraud was discovered by "sheer accident".

Chichester Crown Court heard that Clark did have a serious accident in 1990 when he fell off his ladder and broke both his heels.

He was told at the time he would never walk again and claimed benefits.

But when he began to recover he did not tell the Department of Social Security that he was working.

He signed forms claiming he could not walk more than a few yards.

Mr Lovegrove told the court: "He also said his arms were so weak he could not lift a 1.5 litre carton of milk."

Clark admitted four charges of false accounting and was given a two-year prison sentence which was suspended for two years.

Judge Anthony Thorpe told Clark he had only been saved because he cared for his elderly disabled parents and a terminally ill step-son.

The judge ordered a full transcript to be sent to the Social Security Secretary Alistair Darling.

The judge said: "He can look for himself at the sort of problem he has got out there, if he didn't already appreciate it."

The judge also told Clark that his crime brought genuine disabled people, who often needed help from the state, into disrepute.

William Emerson, defending, told the court that Clark had suffered a serious injury in which he broke both his heels and it was considered at the time he would be disabled for the rest of his life.

He added: "In around 1995 to 1996 Mr Clark started to recover, not fully but he started to get better and instead of informing the department he had improved he failed to do it."

Mr Emerson said Clark had been earning about £60 a month from window cleaning and it was a sad aspect of the case that if he had been honest he might have continued receiving benefits paid at a lower rate.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.